


Memory

by Skeren



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 06:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5901424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeren/pseuds/Skeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The value of color.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Written October 2005.

Black had always been an important color to him. When he was just new, hardly formed and barely coherent, it had been a color that had instinctively come to him. He’d known it would keep him safe from the displeased kicks raining on him, so he had drawn it around him, arms still covering his face. The pain had quickly stopped, and he’d discovered that black was a color of protection.

It wasn’t long before he learned that green was a color that might suit him. Money, fame, it was green, like the leaves of trees, of success. He wanted it all, and green was the way to get there. It was also the color of deception, of jealousy, and it wasn’t long before he learned it wasn’t his color at all. He’d returned to black, his first color, the one that he’d always known. 

Next he’d found red, wine, blood, decadent berries, it was the color of passion. It was Lust’s color. Again, not his, much as he wished that it might have been. Not one he could keep with even the greatest effort. He’d come away from that experience with the love of cinnamon, so often used in ciders. It made him feel warm, content. The smell and taste of cinnamon was soon something he found himself craving, though why he’d never been certain.

From there it went to gold. Golden tresses on lovely ladies, gold-lined pockets. Golden Alchemy that soon burned red, denying him even the slightest pleasure in the color. He learned to associate that gold with power, but also with something he wanted no part in.

Red was life, pleasures, freedoms, gold was power, chaos, unpredictability, green was prosperity, jealousy, greed, and black was protection, something so much simpler when compared to the other three. It was something he remembered, when his cravings for anything got to be too much. A reminder he’d strayed too far from the first color, from black, to be safe.

But when he saw them all together… He wasn’t sure what to make of the man. Golden eyes, the pale green garb of the prison, bloody bodies littered around. It was poetry in motion. He didn’t take in the hair, for that was inconsequential, common. But the hands, oh the hands caught his attention. Blackened palms with arrays, something he very well remembered from before, though never of that kind.

It was when he smelled the scent of cinnamon, hidden below the musk of not enough washing and too many days alone, that his attention was caught. He knew that he would need to keep this alchemist, this contradiction, near at hand. Because like any contradiction, there is always the chance that it’s being read wrong. 

How he sometimes hated to be right.


End file.
